


The Meeting Place

by hollenius



Category: Law & Order
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:18:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollenius/pseuds/hollenius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been mere weeks since Mike Logan was transferred to Staten Island, and he’s struggling to cope with both his loss of status and the crippling boredom of his new job. Desperate for something to do and somebody to talk to, he reaches out to old colleagues and finds some somewhat unexpected support…</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Meeting Place

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zana/gifts).



It’s been a long two weeks, Mike Logan thought to himself as he entered his apartment on a rainy Friday evening. The longest two weeks of my life. It had actually been three weeks since he had punched a councilman in the face in front of an army of cameras and witnesses, and slightly over two weeks since the paperwork was finalized for his transfer to a dreary domestic department on Staten Island, but it only took him two minutes at his new position to know he would hate it. (Even that was being overly generous; he’d made his mind up the second his new assignment was made.)

Being a homicide detective in a busy Manhattan precinct hadn’t always been the safest or sanest career choice, but it was what he knew and what he loved. In all his years on the force, he’d never spent an entire day at his desk with no cases to work on. He’d never been told he could go home early on a Friday. He had been catching criminals and solving murders, not listening to housewives whine about their disobedient teenagers and filling out appropriate incident reports. He now found himself with hours of unoccupied time at home as well as at work. Hours of free time and absolutely nothing to do during it. 

Other people might have hobbies, but the NYPD tended to sap all that extra time and energy from its recruits. Outside of a middling collection of punk and new wave LPs he had picked up as a young music geek prior to his earliest days on the force, then-Officer Logan had been much too preoccupied with trying to make Detective; after he became a detective, his spare time was almost exclusively dedicated to trying to take on tougher and tougher cases. No time for hobbies. No wife or kids. He wasn’t even sure how long it had been since he had last been on a date.

Mike turned on the tv and flopped onto the couch, not bothering to take his coat or shoes off. He drummed his fingers on the arm of the couch and stared at a point on the wall above the television while some grim newscaster droned about the economy. He got back up and turned the tv off and walked to his dingy nook of a kitchen to grab the telephone. He couldn’t tolerate another day of coming home to this from a job that was only marginally less dull.

His fingers instinctively traced their way through the rotary dial to the digits of Lennie Briscoe’s home phone number. He’s probably not home yet, Mike thought. He might be the first person he could think to call given his circumstances, but he would probably be the last one to pick up his phone. This was the third time Mike had rung him since the transfer, and like the previous two times, the phone rang for a full minute before the caller hung up with an exasperated sigh. Always the Luddite, the older detective hadn’t bothered hooking up the new answering machine the precinct’s detectives had bought him the previous Christmas . It had been the only time all the detectives had teamed up to get a gift for another one, although Lennie had correctly surmised that they were doing it more for their benefit than for his.

He managed to push those memories of last year out of his head long enough to set about dialing the next number, Anita Van Buren’s. She had pulled him aside shortly before he walked out the door on his last day at the 27th Precinct to tell him she would do anything she could to help. It was worth a shot, but four rings later all he got was her answering machine. He couldn’t bring himself to leave a message. Not yet, anyway. It was too early to seem so desperate.

He pulled a crumpled list of names and numbers out of his pocket and debated whether it was even worth it to call any of the rest of them. What was he even trying to accomplish in the first place? Was he prioritizing all his contacts based on how much he genuinely wanted to talk to them, or was it all about how much they could help him get back to Manhattan? He had been the one to punch that politician and it was his decision, his fault that he was in this mess in the first place. (“Nice to see good old-fashioned Catholic guilt rearing its ugly head after all these years,” he mused internally as he dialed the next number.)

The next several phone calls were more of the same— Donald Cragen’s answering machine, Phil Cerreta’s wife saying her husband would be busy the rest of the month, Claire Kincaid offering a weak apology and saying she wasn’t really sure what she could do and maybe he should call Jack instead. 

“You have reached the answering machine of Jack McCoy. Please leave a mes—“

Mike slammed the phone down mid-word. He felt like a jilted lover, jealously ringing up all his exes in sequence in the hopes one of them had had a change of heart. He looked again at his list of names and numbers. Only two more, and he knew the next one wouldn’t answer…  
\---  
He was seated at his dining room table, somewhere in the middle of yesterday’s New York Times, when Ben Stone heard his phone ring. He hadn’t been expecting any calls, so he wasn’t sure what led him to pick up the phone on this particular night. It might be somebody soliciting his help on a case or on some other legal issue, but at this time of the day it was more likely to be a telemarketer or a political poll. The former prosecutor was just bored enough to take a gamble and answer the call.

“Hello?”

“Ben?” came the incredulous reply. “Ben Stone?”

“Who is this and how do you know my name,” he replied with increasing skepticism.

“It’s Mike Logan. The detective. You remember me.”

“I remember you…” He furrowed his brow, invisible to the man on the other end of the line. What could Mike Logan possibly be calling him about?

“Hey, so I’m just reconnecting with some uh, old colleagues. There’s this Irish pub in this part of Staten Island that I’ve been hanging out at a bit—don’t get the wrong idea—and it’s a pretty nice place, good food, good drink list, cozy atmosphere, the works. Are you doing anything this weekend?”

“…Are you inviting me to go to a bar with you?”

“It’s not a dive bar, it’s nicer than that. And yes, I am inviting you to go to a bar with me—again, don’t get the wrong idea.”

“I’m not getting any ideas at all, that’s how confused I am by all this.”

“Look. Do you want to come or not?”

Ben hesitated a second before responding. He genuinely wasn’t sure how to respond.

“Sure. Give me the address and the time.”

“Ok, get a pen and paper or something. This is a great bar, I promise…It has atmosphere.”

\---  
“So I guess I should ask why you invited me to this den of iniquity…”

Ben knew Mike had said he was taking him to a pub, but their conversation had led him to expect a slightly more upscale venue than where he was currently sitting. The two of them were seated at the bar, wreathed in the halo of cigarette smoke that diffused the establishment’s already dim lighting into something resembling a murky fog at sunset. A static-laden television set was broadcasting the Mets-Yankees game, and the noisy crowd surrounding them reacted audibly to every pitch. It was certainly an atmosphere—it just wasn’t one conducive to eating, breathing, or trying to carry on a conversation where the sentences had more than four words apiece.

Mike took a sip of his second beer and grinned at Ben’s grousing. “It sounds so sordid when you put it like that. It’s just a surprisingly nice restaurant in a not-so-nice neighborhood. You liked the burger, right?”

“It was decent.”

“Come on, it was great and you know it. And there are worse places to catch up with old friends, or make new drinking buddies.” A grouchy drinking buddy was still a drinking buddy, even if his drink of choice this evening happened to be Coca-Cola . A Coca-Cola he appeared to be engaged in a staring contest with. (“Are you turning into Briscoe or something?” “I have to be up early tomorrow morning and I’m getting too old to go drinking, Mike.”). 

“So,” Ben began, “do I fall into the category of ‘old friend’ or ‘new drinking buddy’? I’m still a bit puzzled as to why I am apparently somebody you can turn to for, shall we say, pub-crawling. You were never exactly clamoring for my attention when we were working together.”

“Because we were working together! Key word there being working. I was busy, you were busy, we all had too much going on in our lives at the time.”

“At the time?” Ben inquired.

“Well, I’m not doing a whole lot now. Not after…I take it you saw the news?”

“I did. How could I not?”

“Yeah.” Mike finished off his drink. “It had consequences.”

“If you were going to punch somebody for not getting the verdict you thought he deserved, you couldn’t have picked a worse person, place, or time to do it.”

“Nice to know I have your support,” Mike replied as he signaled the bartender for another drink. “I was caught up in the moment. I didn’t think—“

“You definitely did not think,” Ben interjected.

“…that it would have the consequences it did,” finished Mike.

“You’re lucky to still be on the force at all.”

“I’ve done worse things and not lost my position as a homicide detective. And at least I was reassigned; I didn’t just quit my job.”

The two fell into an uneasy silence after that, interrupted by an eruption of cheers behind them as the Mets scored a rare run on the fuzzy tv that hung over the bar. Mike cursed inwardly at his inability to hold his tongue, and tried to salvage the line of questioning before the other man shut it down entirely.

“What was it like? When you first left your job? I know the circumstances are different.”

Ben sighed. “If your goal in inviting me here was to try and get advice for dealing with your own personal problems, what happened to me happened under completely different circumstances. I’m not trying to be callous, I just honestly don’t think I can help you here.”

“You still had the whatever-you-call-it, the culture shock, of leaving something ingrained into your life. I spent all those years working for something, only to have it taken away from me, and I’m stuck in this lousy job in this lousy borough. Ben, I have almost nothing to do at work, and I am going completely insane because of it. You have to have some sort of advice or something. You didn’t go nuts or kill yourself or something when you stopped working for the DA.”

“I wouldn’t ‘go nuts’ and I wouldn’t commit suicide. I have my beliefs and my standards, and I stick to them. It would’ve been more intolerable for me to stay at the job after what happened…”

He hadn’t been looking at Mike while he had been speaking, but now he looked up to see the policeman staring intently at him, nursing another drink.

“Is this really why you asked me here? Some sort of moral support?”

“Maybe. I dunno. If I just wanted legal help I could’ve just invited Jack McCoy over instead.”

“He seems more your type. Loud and obstinate—plays really well in courts,” Ben added sarcastically.

Mike rolled his eyes. “We’re less alike than you think, trust me.”

Ben cracked a smile, and then signaled to the barman for a drink. Mike eyed his beer with a smug sense of triumph.

“Whatever happened to having to wake up early?”

“One Guinness won’t kill me,” Ben said with a shrug. “And if you’re going to sit here and probe me about my past for the next half-hour, then I might need it.”

“Look, I know you think I’m totally tactless. I probably am. But I’ve had the rug totally ripped out from under me, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t having a hard time with it. If you want to be cynical, then yeah, sure, I’d been planning to wheedle a bunch of legal advice out of you and everybody else. Honestly though, all I really need immediately is something to do to distract from the damn guilt. Boredom and guilt.”

“I’ve taken some comfort from my faith, but I know you aren’t a fan of the subject.”

“You got that right.”

“I do a lot of reading, a lot of thinking about things. I travel. I’ll probably do more traveling in the months ahead. I’ve done some volunteering and taken on a few pro bono cases—not that that particular thing would be something you could do, but just as an example. You’re asking a lot of me to try and figure out how to solve your problems here.”

“I know. I feel dumb for asking all of a sudden.”

“No, it’s fine. I mean, you at least took the initiative to try to find somebody to talk to, rather than sit around sulking about it. It’ll get better. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but it will at least give you some perspective and an opportunity to think. It might teach you a thing or two about learning to hold your temper as well. You can’t change what already happened, so you need to find a way to move past it”

“I’ll laugh if I come out of this whole thing looking like some sort of Buddhist monk. If I--”

The conversation was interrupted by a choir of curses and the loud crash of a chair being overturned behind them. A young man in a Mets hat was screaming at the occupants of the table next to his, all of whom were festooned in Yankees gear, and who were beginning to rise from their own seats in anger.

“You might get some sort of chance to prove yourself sooner than you think…”  
\---  
Mike stood up, hand on his badge in the pocket of his jacket. “All right, calm down! Calm down. No need to get in a fight over baseball,” Mike belted at the seething throng.

The whole room quieted down almost immediately, and the warring baseball factions stopped and stared at him. (“The patented Mike Logan death-glare comes out yet again,” remarked Ben from behind him, and it was all Mike could do to not break out into a smirk. He still had it. Maybe.)

The boy in the Mets hat swerved towards him, wavering slightly. He was visibly very drunk. “Why the fuck not? Who’s gonna stop me?”

“Detective Mike Logan, N.Y.P.D.,” he said, as he pulled out his badge. “You’d better cut the crap right now, all of you, because I am feeling unusually charitable right now. If you shut up, I won’t write you up. Deal?”

The whole bar was staring at him now, silent except for the distant clink of glass and the television announcing yet another Mets loss. Sensing defeat from all possible angles, the drunk backed away, righting his flipped chair and sitting in it at his table as if nothing had happened. The policeman stared, dumbfounded at the effect he’d just had without having lifted a finger.

“Mike,” said a voice from behind him, as the patrons gradually resumed their conversations.

“Come on Ben, let’s head out.”  
\---  
The two men emerged from the bar into the relative silence of the city streets at night. Ben had to admit, for New York City, this particular street was downright peaceful, with only the distant wailing of sirens and a car alarm there to remind him he was still in the city.

“You had me all worried about the neighborhood, but this place is—“

“Not as bad as it looks,” finished Mike. “I still can’t believe I shut those people up so easily. Back when I was a beat cop, I got stuck in a lot of flat-out bar brawls. It’s a better-behaved crowd here most nights. Good place, usually.”

“I don’t know,” said Ben, “The pub didn’t live up to the lofty reputation you claimed it had, but you at least seem to be growing to tolerate Staten Island.”

Mike looked up at the night sky, searching vainly for stars amongst the lights of skyscrapers and passing airplanes. “I can tolerate it, but it’ll never feel right, you know?”

Ben watched his fruitless stargazing for a second, before looking at his watch. He really needed to be getting home. He approached Mike, extending a hand as a parting gesture. The detective’s eyes returned earthwards before sweeping back up to meet Ben’s own. To his surprise, Mike stepped forward and grabbed him in a full embrace. He was surprisingly warm and unsurprisingly powerful. Ben attempted an awkward hug back, but Mike had broken the embrace just as soon as he had initiated it. Those dark eyes were boring back at him again.

“Ben…Thanks. I needed this.”

“You’re welcome, I suppose. Thank you for inviting me.”

The two of them shook hands and began walking their separate ways. Without thinking, Mike found himself turning and shouting to Ben halfway down the sidewalk.

“Same time next week then?” 

To his surprise, Ben shouted back.

“Sure. But this time, I get to pick the location.”


End file.
